This contemplative tale of survival is a unique and poetic excursion.
A man and his son live a quiet life hunting and trapping until interlopers bring trouble to their woods in Stewart’s novel.
In an unspecified location in the bitter northern wilderness, an unnamed trapper lives with his son in the secluded woods. The nearest town, reachable only by walking or water plane, is many miles away through the wilds. No one there knows the trapper, but they know of him, remembering how he towed his sick wife to town on a dog sled with his son strapped to his back years ago. She died in the hospital, leaving the trapper to raise their son on his own. In flashbacks, the reader learns that the trapper’s grandfather built the hunting lodge and cabins in the area, which were later lost in a card game by the trapper’s father, leaving only a small parcel of land with a single cabin for the trapper and his son. The book reads like a stream-of-consciousness version of Jack London’s fiction, part White Fang and part “To Build a Fire.” Much of the book follows the trapper teaching his son, also unnamed in the narrative, how to survive off the land, schooling him in hunting, ethics, and mortality. Their secluded paradise, and the slow, plot-light narrative, is interrupted by the new owners of the hunting lodge, arriving to ready the site for their business venture. The dramatic shift in the plot and pacing is effective, but the author’s mastery is in metaphors, which are woven throughout the story seamlessly (“The mute alarm of absent sirens is loud if you’re listening and the tension in the woods can feel like the skin of a snare drum”). Layered over the detailed descriptions of the wilderness, the novel’s contrasting depictions of masculinity—the trapper who lives in harmony with nature versus the city men who mean to tame it—make for a complex take on the survival novel.
This contemplative tale of survival is a unique and poetic excursion.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2022
ISBN: 9781777221126
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Lucky Dollar Media
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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